Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 15, Number 26, June 24, 1988
Jacques Cheminade
Ethics of a 'Marshall Plan'
.to rescue Mrica-an� agriculture
The speech edited and abridged here below was delivered by
We must do it today, on a world scaie, for the South,
Mr. Cheminade, president of the Schiller Institute of France,
more and better. Nearing a breaking point, a crossroads of
at the Institute's international agriculture conference on May
history, we must take hold of the tiller-we, you and me­
28,1988 in Nancy, France.
and change direction.
Mesdames and Messieurs producers:
"yeast" of all the officers and all the soldiers ready to make
The Schiller Institute inte�ds to be the catalyst and the
Allow me to class all of you here under this lovely name.
this war on usury. We are here gathered-farmers from the
what is going on in the world: production at home razed, the
the United States of America, union and political leaders,
We are gathered today in Nancy, because we cannot accept
Moselle, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France, Denmark, Germany,
Third World annihilated, and everywhere, the inalienable
men_and women of reflection and action, together engaging
here to give birth to a just economic order, and to combat the
and insurance, a Chadian and a farmer from the FNSEA
rights of man to moral and material progress flouted. We are
one in which we live, subjected to the laws of speculation in
in combat! Here stand side by side, against the banks of usury
[National Federation of Farmers' Unions], a Compagnon de
real estate, stocks, and finance. We are here to say "no" to
la Liberation and a young student, a farmer from the FFA
of the corporate raiders-this Europe of the vultures-which
to let die the Germany of Schiller and Beethoven, the France
the Europe of the insurance and banking cartels, to the Europe
is the travesty of the Europe we have dreamed of for so long.
We are here to declare war against financial usury and to
propose a war strategy: This strategy is called �New Marshall
[French Federation of Farmers] and those who do not wish
of Pasteur and Jaures: It is this amalgam-just as Lazare
Carnot made an amalgam of the soldiers of the Year Two­
which makes up our forces! For, together, we do not seek
Plan for a just world economic order. I would like to say
scapegoats, we do not let ourselves be buried in "second
from the outset that this is not a technocratic artifice, a "trick,"
causes": We are builders of a moral econom!cs, which con­
.a borrowed miracle-recipe introduce� from outside by some
administrative authority or cabinet ministry. This is not a
"supplement of the soul" of some minister tormented by his
bad conscience; it is our war strategy and it is the very soul
of the economics that we must build.
We must move to a new economic order in which those
in need are able to buy from those who produce, for it is
thus-in all human history-that "development" has been
implemented and sustained.
There is a precedent to this, the Marshall Plan between
the United States and Europe: In 1947, there was an America
which had� during the war, accumulated immense increases
in productivity, and an impoverished Europe, with no money
to pay. The solution was to carrY out a transfer of substance
and technology-in the mutual interest-the United States
feeding and capitalizing Europe in the course of which it
satisfied its interest, i.e., markets for its products.
EIR
June
24, 1988
structs, against the law of usury, which first exploits, and
then annihilates.
We will undoubtedly lose several battles, but we know
how to lose them to our advantage; we will arise each time
stronger, and w� will win the war! For we live in a terrible
era: Famine and disease kill millions of men, they spread
each day, and, worse yet, many of us have grown accustomed
to this. Too many of the world's leaders are silenced by the
appetite for power, and have renounced giving politics a
moral leadership, while their people, manipulated and as if
struck by impotence, accept the intolerable. Those who try
to "live with it" lose, every day, a bit of their dignity.
The murder, torture, the denial of justice that unroll be­
fore our eyes in the world, the wretched men that are thrown
against each other, as in Ethiopia and Uganda, the wretched
men and women stricken with this modem plague which is
AIDS, and those victims of the return of "classical" epidemEconomics
© 1988 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.
13
ics, this "calamity" makes our era similar to that wherein St.
Augustine raised his voice as the Roman Empire crumbled.
Then, as today, a usurious financial system crushed peoples,
moral culture appeared to the weak as a lost illusion, and­
like today-there was the proliferation of sects and bigotry,
of cults of blood, soil, and race, of Oriental despotisms.
Then, as today, pessimism, cynicism, and pettiness grew,
each pretending to close his eyes arid act as if everything were
business as usual, each following his career or cultivating his
clientele.
Were we to limit ourselves to looking at things this way,
as objective "givens," we would surely lose hope. And how
that would please our enemies, for that is precisely what they
seek! On the contrary, what our foes fear is that, like Augus­
tine, and based on the same sources, we should wish to
change things at this late hour, to find again the order of
Beauty, Truth, and the Good.
We still can create a world commensurate with human
dignity. But if we wish to succeed in this task, we can only
do it from the highest standpoint of politics and morality,
fully aware of what we are doing, and sticking together,
fighting side by side.
The facts we have to face are simple and terrible:
I) We are told of agricultural overproduction and the drop
in demand for industrial plant, while three out of four persons
suffer hunger, undernourishment, and malnutrition, while
the average diet is declining in the industrialized countries­
becoming less and less rich in proteins-and while the Third
World is terribly undercapitalized.
2) The countries of the Third World are overindebted,
and do not have or no longer have access to financial re­
sources to buy our industrial and agricultural products.
3) Our natural customers are becoming therefore less and
less capable of equipping and feeding themselves in the pres­
ent financial order, in the usurious order imposed by the
International Monetary Fund and the banking, insurance, and
food cartels, who hide their dictatorship under a label of free
enterprise and "liberalism."
Debt as an instrument of genocide
The hour is late: Producers of the North, and in particular
you farmers, and producers of the South, those we call Third
World countries, are stricken by the same evil.
You farmers were told to go into debt to buy machinery,
and to produce, with that machinery, the goods that would
let you repay the loans and cultivate your farms better than
your forefathers. But since you bought the machinery, inter­
est rates have gone up-and hence, the financial burden of
your operation. The costs of production have gone up.
And on the other hand, the markets are not there, because
the countries of the South cannot eat, and the countries of the
North are eating more and more poorly. Therefore, they tell
us: There is overproduction, since nobody can buy your
product! We must share the misery, put quotas on production!
14
Economics
We must freeze land under cultivation-that is what [the
European Community bureaucracy in] Brussels exacts. And,
at.the same time, they block prices above certain limits on
production-they are no longer guaranteed-which, on av­
erage, entails a drop in prices.
This translates into ruin-above all for the youngest, who
made the best effort to modernize their equipment. The farm­
ers' average age is rising to over 50 years, and this is entirely
a policy of agricultural euthanasia, a strangulation by usury.
The countries of the South are victims of the same evil,
except their "case" is far more advanced. They were also told
to become indebted. They became indebted, and now a great
part of the revenues are diverted from production; they also
are finding no markets, internal or external, to sell their
products to. They "break" prices in desperation, underpaying
their labor, and as their currency is devalued, the more they
export in quantity, the less they receive in revenues. And
they are exporting at the cost of the very substance of their
economies, which are thereby delivered over into looting.
Under the International Monetary Fund's order, their
economic substance is being "burned up" without creating
the base for future production. That is the politics of looting
of resources and genocide of peoples, one hundred times
worse in its consequences than the atrocities of Hitler. This
is an accepted, deliberate genocide.
The proof? Occasionally it surfaces, as in the statements
of the Global 2000 Report, done under the Carter administra­
tion in the United States, but which unfortunately remains
timely, which foresaw a "reasonable" reduction in world
population by 2 billion inhabitants, by any means. Moreover,
we have this Swiss joumallntemational Wehrrevue, which,
reckoning the inescapable depopulation of Africa thanks to a
resurgence of epidemics and AIDS-50% walking dead from
AIDS in the tropical belt-envisages repopulating Africa
with whites to control access to strategic raw materials.
What the Club of Rome proposed was to "triage" the
population between those who will be allowed to eat and
those who will not, triage analogous to that done in the
trenches during 19 14- 18, which the Club of Rome proposed
be accomplished before our very eyes.
Mr. Aurelio Peccei, then president of the Club of Rome,.
wrote seven years ago: "Any other aberrant comportment by
our species would weigh heavily toward guilty in the tribunal
of life. It is its exponential growth, which one can only define
as cancerous. Except for insects, rare are those species that
multiply so blindly and so ferociously as our own. . . ." and
then Peccei added: "We are already asking ourselves if, with
respect to the majestic flow of evolution, homo sapiens, taken
as a whole, may not represent a deviant phenomenon, if it is
not a caprice of Nature, a miscarried ambitious attempt, a
production error, which adjustments that assure the renewal
of life will overshadow, intent on destroying or absorbing."
These insane ideas of Mr. Peccei and his malthusian clique­
sponsored by the oligarchies of usurious finance-are being
EIR
June 24, 1988
applied today in Africa.
The per capita Gross National Product has droppe'd 20%
throughout the African continent-excepting South Afri­
ca-since 1980. For the 20 years between 1962 and 1982,
food production dropped 20% in Africa. In the tropics, 2050% of Africans are seropositive-20-50% walking dead.
The life expectancy of the African population, already low,
is being depressed: by infant mortality and by the sharp rise
in adult mortality due to massive deportations, to famines,
and to epidemics. The average life expectancy of an African
is about 40 years. Cholera is reappearing in East Africa,
gastroenteritis, viral hepatitis, trypanosomes, everywhere
malaria, and now AIDS. Yes, AIDS which is striking Africa
full force, and whose effects the Soviet criminals of the
World Health Organization and the American criminals of
the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control have covered up.
For lack of prevention, the locusts today are in the process
of descending on the Sahel and threaten to swarm over the
entire continent, as far as the Mediterranean coast of Italy,
Spain, and even France.
Why are there between 20 and 100 million carriers of �he
AIDS virus in Africa? Because there was a deliberate col­
lapsing of the environment-the basic conditions of health,
hygiene, and work. The number of sick is growing not only
because of the weakening of organisms taken one by one, but
of specific, aggravated forms of disease spreading throughout
an altogether weakened environment.
It is like the Nazi or Stalinist concentration camps, or the
trenches in 1914-18 of the French Army and especially the
Russian Army: In the ignoble and inhuman conditions of the
Nazi camps, periodic waves of typhus would kill some of the
prisoners; under the conditions of collapse in Europe at the
end of World War I, Spanish influenza took more victims
than the war itself, over 30 million dead, 500,000 of them in
the United States!
Today AIDS is the new sign of collapse, taking its depar­
ture from the most vulnerable place, where human immune
systems are the most feeble, and spreading everywhere. There
are already several million under death sentence, walking
dead, in our industrialized countries, the same way Spanish
influenza disembarked in the United States, far from the
scene of the war, in 1914-18.
Yes, Africa is dying, and we must extirpate this evil at
its roots. The conditionalities of the IMF-in Africa as well
as Latin America, in Mali as well as in Argentina-impose
the destruction of the substance of economies and the capac­
ity to feed the population in order to collect the funds to allow
the payment of debt.
Illegitimate debt
A usurious system causes the death of entire peoples,
while three-quarters of their debt is illegitimate, because this
debt is not a consequence of the flow of money having stoked
the production of goods in the physical economy .. ThreeEIR
June 24, 1988
quarters of this debt was extorted, stolen in three ways: hikes
in real interest rates, as in the case of our farmers; hikes in
the prices of industrial products or imported capital goods,
and rises in the cost of cultivation, as in the case of our
farmers; drops in the price of imported raw materials and
drops in the price of products sold, again as in the case of our
farmers, except that the size of the drop is far greater. For
example, for the same volume of cotton sold, Mali, Chad,
and Central African Republic receive 50% less in dollar terms
than in 1984! The price drop in cacao and coffee alone has
ruined Ivory Coast.
Three elements have reinforced this entanglement, this
new debt slavery: 1) capital flight, legal or otherwise, toward
the financial markets of the North, encouraged by all the
major banks; 2) the absorption of more and more funds into
organized crime and drug trafficking, which brings back 100
times more than food production (drugs amount to $50-100
billion in profits each year); 3) prestige spending, agreed to
by certain regimes inspired by the financier interests in the
North.
The Third World countries' debt must therefore be ana­
lyzed, not as legitimate debt contracted by states for econom­
ic development, but as an organized criminal transfer of funds
to totally unproductive interests. Liberals call this the "Invis­
ible Hand," perhaps because they don't see that the emperor
has no clothes.
But, as we have seen with AIDS, debt strangulation af­
fects not only Third World countries. Is it the "rich" North
that loots a "poQr" South? No. For, how would we explain
the "looters" becoming the "unemployed," that the produc­
tive economies of the North are collapsing too, that agricul­
ture, machine tools, steel, and capital goods in general are
collapsing? A multinational, malthusian oligarchy organizes
the looting of production everywhere.
The United States is far more indebted than the Third
World, comparatively. There is no "recovery" in the United
States, or "recovery" in Europe. The world economy is to­
tally bankrupt in the present system. The first financial crash,
Oct. 19, 1987, sounded the alarm. But nothing, nothing was
done to recreate a sane economy.
The ethics of the Marshall Plan are the opposite of this
crisis management, this constant adaptation to the worst case.
The New Marshall Plan starts with the idea of the economy,
that it is people who produce goods and useful services, and
in order to do this they must receive long-term, low interest
credits.
The New Marshall Plan starts with the idea that a "nor­
mal" world obeying the laws that govern the development of
the universe, is a world built-as written in Genesis-for
humanity to increase and multiply. A world in which ever
more productive new technologies allow us to feed and edu­
cate more people, and produce more creators.
The idea of the fund is simple-it was the initial idea of
what was called the Guillaume Plan [after former Agriculture
Economics
15
Minister Fran<;ois Guillaume 1: There is an agricultural sur­
plus in the countries of the North; all right, let us feed the
countries of the South. With what resources? By demanding
a "fair price"-a price in line with the costs of production­
from buyers "in the black" (U.S.S.R., Japan, Saudi Arabia,
United Arab Emirates, South Korea). Today, these buyers
are underpaying for farm products, with which the Russians,
in particular, make up their strategic stockpiles. The surplus
obtained thanks to this "fair price," will then allow the Third
World to be fed and capitalized.
Beyond the 'Guillaume Plan'
We support this Plan as a first step, and we will explain
why. However, here, we pose the problem on an entirely
different scale.
First of all, it should not be a question of an "artifice," to
rob Peter to pay Paul, but of the heart of economics: That
means an open struggle, face to face, between the neo-liberal
ethic, the IMF's financier ethic, and ours, the Judeo-Chris­
tian ethic, that of the Book of Genesis. Either the conception
of the IMF wins, or ours does; there is no place for compro­
mise.
We are dealing with two opposite poles in human thought.
On one side is financial exploitation, management of a world
of limited resources, of a "finite" world exploited by an elite
caste of predators. On the other is the ethic of human labor,
which transforms and elevates the order of nature, human
labor willfully mastered to constantly engender new technol­
ogies, ever more productive, a world open to the infinite.
The big problem with the Guillaume Plan was not only
that its friends did not get into the ring and fight for it, and
that the last government did not make a New Marshall Plan a
pivot of its policy. The major problem was-and is-that
they did not stand up to the IMF, and the insurance, banking,
and food cartels. Mr. Guillaume and his friends pretended to
"make do," and it is on this fundamental ethical point that
our paths diverge.
The decisive stakes, without which the rest is babbling,
is to create a new financial system capable of halting the law
of financial looting in order to permit the takeoff of the Mar­
shall Plan.
To those who say, "But where are you going to find the
money, the credit? What can you do with these countries,
already so indebted?" we must reply, "Do you want to let
both the Third World countries and our farmers die? Whom
does it profit?"
A first element of response was given by the papal encyc­
licals which reject both the destructive and totalitarian Rus­
sian model and the "liberal" model, which masks the equally
destructive financial dictatorship. The encyclicals Populo­
rum Progressio and Laborem Exercens underline the incom­
patibility between the justice of growth and these opposite
conceptions.
Paul VI in Populorum Progressio called "development"
16
Economics
the new name for peace. John Paul II, in Laborem Exercens,
"
takes off from the fundamental idea that man must perfect
the universe in perfecting himself. His allies in this task are
science and technology, which are elaborated by the intellec­
tual labor and material of preceding generations, and which
today "free man from the fatigue of his hands and his mus­
cles" in becoming realized in the form of machines and me­
chanical devices of greater and greater productivity. John
Paul II writes in Laborem Exercens: "In attaining ever more
mastery over the earth thanks to his labor and in affirming,
again through labor, his domination over the visible world,
man remains, in each case and in each phase of this process,
in line with the original plan of the Creator, and this plan is
necessarily and indisputably tied to the fact that the human
being was created, in the quality of man and woman, in the
image of God.
"Man, created in the image of God, participates through
his labor in the world of the Creator, and continues in a certain
sense, to the extent of his abilities, to develop it and complete
it . . . above all in developing technology, that is to say in
realizing an assembly of instruments of labor ever more per­
fect."
It is the proper task of man, the most exalting task, to
create, that is to accomplish, to radiate "charity" in St. Paul's
meaning, agape. Agape, this beautiful Greek word, is divine
love-love for the word of the Creator-realized, accom­
plished through love for each human being-in a common
word that builds the universe.
This common word is what defines the ethic of the Mar­
shall Plan between farmers here at home and in the Third
World countries: to build together great projects which uplift
those who take part in them, which makes them "great,"
seeing seeing farther and higher than they could ever have
imagined themselves doing.
The financial looting cannot be arrested until it is de­
nounced, pointed out, and attacked by an alliance organized
by producers and consumers.
Look at the Pasteurians who went into Africa, Indochina,
and Brazil to conquer epidemic disease. It is shameful that in
the 19th century, the engineer Duponchel, a friend of Eiffel,
had already conceived the project for trans-Sarahan and trans­
Siberian railroads, and that nothing had been done since. It
is shameful that Lake Chad was allowed to evaporate, de­
priving the center of Africa of a breath of moisture. It is
shameful that the engineer Rendaire had conceived, a bit
later, an irrigation project in the south of Tunisia and Algeria
by an inland sea occupying the salt flats, but nothing ever
came of it since. Closer to us, King Hassan II of Morocco
conceived a Saharan green belt, a vast irrigated band fed by
nuclear plants, a project of "peace through economic devel­
opment," benefiting all of North Africa. And no one respond­
ed to him.
I am saying here that the mission of France, above all,
and of Europe and the United States, is to respond.
EIR
June 24, 1988